Voices from the Margins

Voices from the Margins Community Knowledge as an ‘Alliance of Hope’: people to people links between India and Japan in the twentieth century Surajit Sarkar Centre for Community Knowledge Ambedkar University Delhi Memory and Nationhood Whenever many South Asian family and friends discuss the 1947 transfer of governance to the new states of India and Pakistan, the talk is about communal tensions among Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities, or focus on contemporary political shenanigans in the region. Though many in North India were directly affected by the events of 1947, its personal and familial impact is rarely discussed . This interplay of easy conversation and silences around the Partition is a trope in the inheritances of history and family mythology in many Pakistani and Indian families. When Guneeta Singh Bhalla went to school in the US, she would wonder why her textbooks did not include a single chapter on the Partition. "My father was born in Lahore and his family was forced to flee to the newly formed India in 1947, migrating from Lahore to Amritsar on August 14.They faced many hardships in those early days but eventually settled down in Delhi. What I found strange was that it was not even mentioned in my textbooks while we learned about the Holocaust or the Hiroshima- Nagasaki bombings in world history class," said Guneeta, who was born in Delhi and moved to the US at the age of 10. In 2008, while pursuing a Ph.D. in Florida, Guneeta spent time studying at the University of Tokyo. On a day off, she took a trip to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the site that honors the victims of the Aug. 1, 1945, atomic bombing. "It was so powerful to hear the stories of experiencing the atomic bomb from survivors. Suddenly it was all very real and human and I felt their pain much more than watching videos of the mushroom cloud or reading written accounts of those hours that followed the dropping of the bomb."1The Memorial’s oral history videos influenced Guneeta much more than she realised. “It was telling on the health of the whole family. so we thought we should better move out, it is a matter of 15-20 days of madness, let us go to Shimla. My grandparents were there in the house because usually, old people were not killed till then. He said we are very happy here, the old people will look after the house, you go... On 14 August my father was glued to the radio and we heard him sobbing and we came down to see our fathers beard had gone half grey. He couldn’t bear the shock... Afterwards my father said he was leaving to rescue his parents. He travelled for 13 days on foot, on empty bullock carts from Shimla to Amritsar. Somehow he crossed the border and found his parents in a refugee camp. He called up his friend Dr Mohammed Yusuf and asked can I go to my house, and his friend said no, no, no – the 1 https://www.telegraphindia.com/states/west-bengal/chronicles-of-a-departure- remembered/cid/1495163 1 people who have occupied it roam around with daggers all the time, because it is a huge house. They don’t want other refugees to occupy the house.”( Ajit Cour, New Delhi) 2 This interview from an archive of nearly seven thousand oral histories in digital video at the Partition Archives at https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/ gives an unexpected insight into communication between people across the border three generations later. Making it possible to conceptualize a true ‘people’s history’ at a time when the echo chambers of nationalism present a challenge in developing a three-dimensional model of how the millions of people were affected by Partition. Guneeta Singh Bhalla believes storytelling is reshaping the memory of the 1947 partition. “I grew up in Faridkot, a border town in Punjab and could see two TV channels, not one like elsewhere in the two countries. So I could watch both Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto. It was a time when government forces were seeking Sikh separatists amongst us, in Punjab. Meanwhile elsewhere in the country in the comfort of home, life went on as usual.3” She remembers hearing stories of the past of the land from grandparents joined sometime by others in the dark electricity-less nights, as she lay in bed on the roof of their house. “Such one on one storytelling between two people creates a bond that is so vital for our minds that we crave it, after the first time we’ve experienced it.4” It was in this manner, she learnt about partition, about her own family in the days before she was born. These stories inspired her love for nature, and sparked her interest in human conflict, as she lay in bed surrounded by the two. Visual storytelling can become a deeply enriching experience and she wanted to share it with everyone. She was also troubled with the realization that the generation of eyewitnesses to partition was nearly gone, taking their stories with them. Surprised and pained at the younger generation's "lack of knowledge" about Partition, she initiated the creation of the Partition Archive. A kind of archive that could give shape to subaltern narratives, which are otherwise easily lost, scattered or obscured behind concentric circles of institutional walls or individual privacy, resulting in a relative flattening of Partition narratives in circulation. ‘Nationalised memory #1’ Hiroshima , the A-survivor (hibakusha) The twelve years between August1945, when the atom bomb was dropped, and April 1957, when the Japanese state officially "nationalized" memories of the atomic bombing by providing medical care for A-bomb survivors (hibakusha), living testimonials of the event, illustrate a historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Mayor Hamai of Hiroshima stated at the Peace Memorial Ceremony on August 6 1949: "Today is the fourth occasion on which we, the citizens of Hiroshima, have remembered our dead. We earnestly pray that such a tragedy will never occur on the earth again." Here, what was remembered were the dead and this "tragedy" was 2 Ajit Cour, Interview online at the Partition Archives. https://youtu.be/i8LFUFVHMhw 3 Guneeta Singh Bhalla, TEDx Ashoka University, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=j_QYPCDuFPk 4 Guneeta Singh Bhalla, TEDx Ashoka University, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=j_QYPCDuFPk 2 regarded as already over (so that they could pray that another one would never occur). By the late 1940s the equation of Hiroshima’s and of Japan’s postwar “mission” with a quest for peace, and, furthermore, the equation of the pursuit of peace with the pursuit of capitalist modernity, was fast becoming a dominant official interpretation of the bombing. The Occupation formally ended when Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty in September 1951. Eager to leave behind traumas of the war and look for signs of Japan's fresh postwar start; Japan’s celebrated peace constitution and the discourse of peace made the Japanese adherents of what Carol Gluck called “a cult of new beginnings” that helped them forget what had preceded the end of the war. On August 6, 1952, publication of "The First Exhibition of A-Bomb Damage," which showed photographs of the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the first time shocked Japanese by images of the devastation that the atom bombs had inflicted upon the humans and the cities. 520,000 copies were sold out in a single day. (700,000 copies were sold in total.) The contribution of print capitalism in forging an imagined community lay as much in the production of images as in that of the print or letters, for images did not require cultural literacy and therefore could penetrate into nonelite groups of Japanese. This narrative created in Hiroshima credited the bomb, as Americans often did, with bringing peace and ending World War II. In Hiroshima’s account, however, it was Hiroshima’s sacrifice rather than the bomb itself that brought peace. With this “baptism of fire” (another often-repeated phrase), Hiroshima was transformed into a transnational city of peace with a special mission to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear war. Curiously, this discourse was both distinctively Japanese, continuing the prewar trope of Japanese uniqueness, and universal at the same time: erasing any particular ethnic identity of other non-Japanese victims.5 Terrains of Memory In 2017-18, Newsweek Japan recently devoted four cover stories to a series of two- hour special seminars led by Professor Carol Gluck of Columbia University, the interpretive framework for the sessions emerging from her book, Past Obsessions: World War II in History and Memory. “Americans say the atomic bomb “ended the war and saved American lives.” For Japanese, the bomb bequeathed on Japan “its postwar mission for peace.” I suppose both stories have lasted in part because postwar history has supported them: a peaceful, prosperous Japan, the US-Japanese alliance, the threat of nuclear war, and so on.” The moral ambiguity in regard to the dropping of the atomic bombs still continues, and Gluck says, “It would be good for everyone not only to remember the lesson of the atomic bombs, but also to understand the history of how and why they were developed and used. Otherwise, it could unthinkingly happen again.”6 5 Ran Zwigenberg, The most modern city in the world: Isamu Noguchi’s cenotaph controversy and Hiroshima’s city of peace, Critical Military Studies, Volume 1, 2015 - Issue 2: Re-imagining Hiroshima 6 Ross Yelsey; Newsweek Japan Reports on Carol Gluck’s Seminar ‘World War II in Public Memory’ 3 The discussion focused on the way public memory is created, maintained, and altered over time.

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